Novice Item Generalisation in persons with Anomic Aphasia: Comparison across two treatment techniques

Abstract

Background: Lexical semantic breakdown leads to difficulty in naming and the lexical semantic breakdown can occur due conceptual deficits, failure in lemma node activation or faulty phonological decoding, the techniques used in remediating lexical semantic breakdown should consider the loci of lexical semantic breakdown. As the person with aphasia uses these techniques, the person learns in exercising associations and this associations would further help in remediating lexical-semantic breakdown. Aim: The study investigated untrained item generalisation in persons with aphasia exposed to Semantic feature analysis (SFA) and Phonological component analysis (PCA) Materials and Methods: 10 participants with anomic aphasia were considered for the study and the participants were divided into two groups of 5 each. The first group was trained using SFA and the second group was trained using PCA. The training was carried using 260 pictures naming test and post-training, the novel/untrained generalisation was assessed using Boston Naming Test. Results: Group exposed to SFA performed better compared to the other group exposed to PCA and the difference in the median values showed statistically significant difference on Man-Whitney U test and the results signified the salience of strengthening the semantic network, which further would facilitate association and related word learning Conclusion: The two techniques had differential effects on the performance, hence the clinicians using these two techniques should choose the techniques wisely and based on the deficit exhibited the patients regardless of the diagnosis.